I’m confused by “A Message to Our Customers”. As explained by news reports and in Cook’s letter itself, the FBI request and court order aren’t about adding a backdoor to future versions of iOS to be installed on customers’ phones (that’ll be coming soon enough from the legislature), but to install a hacked OS on one individual phone that’s currently sitting in an evidence locker.

The whole point of device encryption was that Apple said for the last two years that such a process would be completely impossible. Yet the open letter never says so, and implies that they could absolutely do it, they just don’t want to. Am I missing something?

The more I think about it (and I can’t seem to stop), the more puzzled I am by Apple’s strategy here. I imagine the crux of the issue was avoiding at all costs to be in the headlines for helping the FBI’s case by hacking into an iPhone. Or, yeah, maybe they’re sincerely that hung up about privacy, whatever — aside from questions about the legality of forcing a company to develop software to aid an investigation, from the pure privacy and ethics perspectives this case isn’t very different from all the earlier times Apple helped law enforcement get into a locked iPhone. It’s an obsolete iPhone; it’s less secure than more recent iPhones; Apple is able to access its data.

Instead:

They’re emphatically acknowleding that an iPhone’s data is completely vulnerable and, in an effort to muddy the waters and make the case appear more general than it is, they’ve even avoided pointing out that any iPhone 5s, 6 or 6s would be completely immune from this form of attack.

Instead of fighting the issue on broad, abstract terms when it is inevitably discussed in Congress, they’ve taken their stand on a case where their opponents can literally accuse them of aiding terrorists.

By making a big splash now instead of waiting for legislative debates, they’re making it a presidential campaign issue — and I’ll bet that very few candidates will choose to be on Apple’s side.

How on earth can this be a good PR strategy? Oh, sure, they have the nerds’ support. Fat load of good that will do, for them and for us.